Beolab 3 scams on Leboncoin - probably!

Just thought I'd share my recent experiences whilst I'm on the hunt for some BL3"s.

I found a pair on Leboncoin (a french advertising/sales site - not an auction site) and contacted the seller by e-mail.  She (Emma) replied that she lives in Denmark and is moving to France and needs the money - don't we all?

I requested the serial numbers and contacted B&O customer services in Struer with the numbers provided. B&O told me 'that is not a valid serial number for Beolab 3 speakers'.  I e-mailed her with a copy of B&O's comments and despite trying to contact her several times to request a valid number - she has not replied.  What a surprise!  she said they were packed and ready to ship so couldn't check!  That was the first one.

Secondly, within a week on Leboncoin, I found an advert for a Beocenter 2 + a pair of BL3's on stands, bought in 2012 and with 1 more year guarantee housed at a second home in France.  Very cheap at 1450 €.  Too cheap!

Again, I contacted the seller who wanted me to make a bank transfer to a bank in Spain - telling me that Leboncoin was a risky place to do business and that eBay offer a payment protection plan for bank transfers.  I duly received 2 messages supposedly from eBay - one was an invoice to show the items with shipping costs etc and the second was a message saying how safe the eBay bank transfer protection system was.  Utter rubbish.

If I clicked on the eBay logo at the top, it connected to nothing - just error messages.  There were no other links on the page - unlike all eBay messages.  It was signed by someone from eBay - never happens and my full name was not displayed as it should have been on the message introduction along with the registered user ID.

I contacted the guy to say the messages were fake and that eBay was in no way involved in the sale of these items as they haven't been listed for sale on eBay.  I'd already told him I'd only pay via Paypal and that he could organise a BIN on eBay with it just accepting purchase from my user ID.  He wouldn't go for that saying Paypal fees were too high and the listing and sellers fees were too high.  So, I offered to pay them!  That flummoxed him!  He just kept saying that the eBay bank transfer policy protected me and did I not trust him?

 I've sent him copies of eBay policy about eBay messages and bank transfers - I didn't receive any messages in my message folder from eBay which indicates he's a scammer but he's gotten really quite upset with me.  I even sent a message to the eBay user ID he said was his (no activity in over 12 months) and of course have had no reply.

Now all I get is abuse from him by e_mail. 

He's supposedly working on a 'wind project' in Spain for 6 months and his mother in France was going to deal with the shipping.  Hot air more like.

Anyhow, I'm still looking for legit BL3's but from a recognised reseller.  I've informed Leboncoin of the 'possible fraud'.

These people think we were born yesterday. 

Has anyone else come across this recently as it seems to be more prevalent than it was?

I'm also seeing the exact same Beocom 5 phone come up on eBay every week despite being sold the week before!  Description and pictures are the same showing the same damage to the handset!

Dave.

 

Dave,

Yesterday I have sent 3 mails to le bon coin asking them to remove 3 sales, they have done it immediately.There are probably 15 left.

They are selling most of the time bl3, bvs, bl5 with fake phone number (quite stupid).

Whatever you are searching for, call the seller you will see if he is serious or not and pick up the things by yourself.

Most of the time the pictures are british ones, you see it when you have a look at the power plug.

These fake sales are present all year but sometimes there are few. Actually there are a lot. I would say that 70 percent of what is sold on le bon coin for b&o is fake.

I will add that there are making a lot of money with this, I have talked about this kind of scammer with collectors and the total of their loss is above 2000 euros.

A bargain price of b&o product won't last 5 hours on le bon coin. Most of the good deals are done extremely fast because a lot of people are searching for b&o bargains or for reselling them.

If you still see a real bargain published some days ago, so there is a big problem with it.

olvisab:

Most of the time the pictures are british ones, you see it when you have a look at the power plug.

Another handy tool is the reverse picture search at http://www.tineye.com/ . The scammers don't have the products they are pretending to sell, so they can't take their own pictures either, and sometimes TinEye finds the original source. Many otherwise legitimate sellers steal pictures simply because they are too lazy - but even that will tell you something of that seller.

Thanks tournedos, that's interesting.

But that's true, the seller can be lazy. I have already used the picture from someone else because I couldn't take a good picture of it (too much cable for example).

tournedos:

olvisab:

Most of the time the pictures are british ones, you see it when you have a look at the power plug.

Another handy tool is the reverse picture search at http://www.tineye.com/ . The scammers don't have the products they are pretending to sell, so they can't take their own pictures either, and sometimes TinEye finds the original source. Many otherwise legitimate sellers steal pictures simply because they are too lazy - but even that will tell you something of that seller.

And then the really scare scammers ask a real seller for pictures and forward them instead. As a rule of thumb when it looks too good to be true, it is. I have a few agents running on hifishark.com so I get a daily email with new listings on items I am interested in. I always skip the ones that look too good to be true.

Send me a PM if you are interested in a pair of wall mounted BL3. I may try a pair of BL18s instead and I could potentially bring them with me on a trip to Paris in the beginning of December.

 

I reported this to Leboncoin 2 hours ago.  I've just tried to retrieve the picture to use the Tineye URL given above and lo and behold, the advert is gone!

No doubt I'll get more abuse from the 'seller'.

I'm 440 km away from Paris.  I'll keep looking.  Thanks for the offer though.  I've already got the floor stands waiting for them.

Dave.

Dear Dave,

 

what color of BeoLab 3 you are looking for?

 

Black.

An easy way to see if something is a scam or not is to ask to come and see the item. Even if they are miles away, it's a good way to test them. 

If they respond with 'oh, I'm not in France at the moment, I have them with me in Amsterdam...' or something similair, say 'Brilliant! I'm actually going to Amsterdam tomorrow, what's your address?'. Clearly, they won't give you the address and it's a scam..

If they respond favourably and are willing to demonstrate and accept cash on collection then all would seem to be ok

It's always my preference to collect.  This was obviously a scam from the start but I wanted to have some fun with it.  He called me 'pathetic' in one post for not playing along with his scam!  Mind you, I'm the one who has all of his bank details; IBAN, BIC, SWIFT etc.  Who's the idiot now!

Dave.

Jonathan:

An easy way to see if something is a scam or not is to ask to come and see the item. Even if they are miles away, it's a good way to test them.

If they respond with 'oh, I'm not in France at the moment, I have them with me in Amsterdam...' or something similair, say 'Brilliant! I'm actually going to Amsterdam tomorrow, what's your address?'. Clearly, they won't give you the address and it's a scam..

If they respond favourably and are willing to demonstrate and accept cash on collection then all would seem to be ok

x:________________________

Jonathan, it seems that you didn't had any contact with those scammers, they do give you an address in irland, spain...

Next step, will you go to an address where nobody is waiting for you?

They already give the phone number of someone else.

Dave, I am sure that soon you won't have any fun to deal with them. They are a cancer, that never surrenders.

Because of them, some loose a lot of money, a lot loose time and everybody suspects everybody.

The only things to do is to send a mail, make a call and contact le bon coin.

olvisab:

The only things to do is to send a mail, make a call and contact le bon coin.

Leboncoin took the advert down immediately - no questions asked.  I'm also contacting eBay because he gave me his eBay user id (assuming it's his). I also have all of his bank details so for a laugh, I thought I'd write to his bank to let them know of his potentially illicit activities.

These 'people' are a cancer.  I don't know what mentality these people have who think it's an acceptable thing to do.  

Mind you, I've just discovered that honesty does not pay either.  We received 11,000 € worth of Canon EOS 700D cameras (18 of them, brand new in their boxes) 2 weeks ago.  We didn't order them but the address label was correctly addressed to my wife.  We should have sold them on eBay but we are too honest.

I contacted the shipping warehouse in the UK who said we'd identified a serious flaw in their operations and computer systems.  They were supposed to go to Amazon in France.  They've been collected to take to Amazon with no thanks, no Amazon voucher or acknowledgement of our honesty. Incredible!  Especially as they said they probably would never have found them if we hadn't contacted them as it wasn't a signed for item.

Dave.

"Mind you, I've just discovered that honesty does not pay either."

Scammer is maybe the second oldest job in the world, so that's not a new thing. But our society doesn't encourage any honest act.

You just have to hear or see the daily news, always an idiot known over internet instead of an honest and courageous citizen.

Honest people = extremely rare breed.

olvisab:

You just have to hear or see the daily news, always an idiot known over internet instead of an honest and courageous citizen.

 

 

Honest people = extremely rare breed.

 

totally agree

 

Things could be always worse in this world, now instead of idiots, we have most of the time barbarians feats, some kind of internet idiots with a gun after all.

You'll have good karma, Dave